Long time no blogg

Too much to do, so the blogg suffers; but I have been reading. Just finished a real feast of words and language. Was in Rio and Budapest. Chico Buarque's book "Budapest" was full of tumbling prose and a real twist at the end. A piece of Brazilian culture that I hadn't been aware of (although I probably should have been). Famous for music - an icon in Brazil - lots of web pages but most in Portuguese.
The picture is not from Budapest or Rio - but to introduce one of the topics that Jared Diamond writes about in his "Collapse". Lots of interesting facts and interpretations in the book, which is meant to try to get people to understand that the interaction between societies and their environoment can have profound consequences. The picture is from Greenland. A group of Norwegians under Erik the Red (the guy that got kicked out of Norway, went to Iceland and then had to leave there as well - not a people person) settled there and the settlement lasted over 400 years, but eventually disappeared. Diamond makes a case for a combination of changing environment (in this case warmer first and then the climate got colder) and the fact that the Norwegians refused to adopt techniques they could have learned from the Inuits. A very interesting fact was that, according to excavations of garbage piles, the Greenland Norwegians ate very little fish (strange, strange).
Interspersed with these somewhat intellectual pursuits is the usual fare of dectective/thriller/crime. One book I found through a blogg - the author of "The Devil's Right Hand", J. D. Rhoades comments on politics and I appreciate these less than complementary writings about the present American president. (http://jdrhoades.blogspot.com/ ) .
I found a new series - out of the Minnesotan wilderness comes the protagonist Cork O'Connor in William Kent Krueger's books "Iron Lake" and "Boundary Waters". Both good reads for people like me that want to be pulled through a story. Also kind of fun because I could figure out who the bad guy was - many pages before it was revealed. Lucky for me there are several more (and true to form I have already ordered them). Finally another Minnesota book - I picked it up at one of my favorite places, The English Book Shop - "Sympathy between humans" by Jodi Compton. It is a sequel and I did read it, but I'm not sure I'm going to read the first book about Sarah Pribek. Among other things this author kills off some of the best characters, like Cicero. Hope it won't be as long to the next entry - lots of books out there.